Who is the lost daughter in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s odd little tale about a mother on holiday who looks back in sorrow at the choices she has made? At the end of The Lost Daughter, playing in competition in Venice, we know the main character Leda so well we can give multiple answers — though several question marks remain. Most of the lingering puzzles seem caused by the need to relocate Elena Ferrante’s novel from Italy to Greece, a country that may seem like a close match, but turns out to be culturally unconvincing.
Leda (a deeply engaging Olivia Coleman) is a 48-year-old professor of comp lit in Cambridge, Mass, who has rented a sun-kissed apartment on a Greek island to spend a leisurely holiday with her books. At first she luxuriates in having the local beach all to herself, where a good-looking Irish beach boy (Paul Mescal) pampers her. But soon her paradise is rudely overrun by a large family of Greek-American gangsters from Queens. (“They’re bad people,” she’s warned.) Not only do they noisily take over the joint, but they even threaten Leda when she declines to move her beach chair.
Played with an extraordinary mix of clarity and eccentricity by the English Colman, whose self-possession seems to have spilled over from her role as Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown, Leda has a charming side and it is the first thing we see in her. Her excitement at reaching the town in her rental car is only slightly dampened by a bone-shaking fog horn and the old caretaker’s (Ed Harris) obvious difficulty in carrying her bags up the stairs and welcoming her. It is when her turf is challenged that she brings out her claws in short, sharp English sentences.
The same double vision is evident when the camera switches to observing Leda as a young woman (Jessie Buckley). She is a married student and the mother of two little girls, whose constant demands for attention drive her crazy. She can be excused for brushing them off while she struggles to write academic papers in the noise and chaos of their apartment. She can be understood when she satisfies her sexual and ego needs with a ranking professor (Peter Sarsgaard) on the lecture circuit, who first compliments her extravagantly on her writing, then beds her. But when she makes a much more controversial decision regarding her daughters, it’s a shocker.
The guilt of this choice, which must have happened 30 years back, still brings tears to her eyes and leaves her short of breath. One day on the beach, she gets acquainted with the beautiful young mother Nina when her small daughter Elena disappears (a very watchable Dakota Johnson gets all the Queens’ mannerisms right as Nina.) After a frantic search, it is Leda who finds the little girl. Nina is overwhelmed with gratitude. But then Leda does something very out of character, a small but meaningful wrong towards Nina and her daughter, that has no explanation and can’t be forgiven.
There are many enjoyable scenes in the film, most of them related to Colman’s self-assured portrayal of an unusual, independent woman who has achieved a lot in life (one imagines she’s a tenured prof at Harvard), but at what personal price?
Many moments play on the tension of an underlying ambiguity, like the vague menace of the family on the beach and, later, a scene at an open-air movie theater where Leda’s enjoyment of an Elizabeth Taylor oldie turns to outrage at the arrival of a pack of rowdy, foul-mouthed boys. As the caretaker, Ed Harris makes some comically laid-back overtures to Leda but romance never takes off; nor does her interest in the beach boy, who has other ideas. This is a small sample of the film’s intriguing interactions.
But then there are the question marks. Why does Leda have a British accent after a lifetime in America? Why are we led to believe that one of her daughters has been lost? And why does this small-scale film clock in at over two hours? A lot of unnecessary repetition could have been avoided, particularly in the younger Leda sequences that badly need trimming.
Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Screenplay: Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on a novel by Elena Ferrante
Cast: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Ed Harris, Peter Sarsgaard, Paul Mescal, Dagmara Dominczyk, Alba Rohrwacher
Producers: Charlie Dorfman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Osnat Handelsman-Keren, Talia Kleinhendler
Cinematography: Hélène Louvart
Production design: Inbal Weinberg
Costume design: Edward K. Gibbon
Editing: Affonso Goncalves
Music: Dickon Hinchliffe
Sound: Leslie Shatz
Production companies: Endeavor Content (US), Samuel Marshall Films (UK), Pie Films (Israel)
World sales: Endeavor Content
Venue: Venice Film Festival (competition)
In English
121 minutes
